ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at specific classes of material culture, groups of objects that have a tacit connection to bodily being, that are either representations of bodies/parts of bodies, that were magically/ritually mobilized to effect change. It considers the body in death as a fabrication, the shifting and unstable terrain of subject to object status, again calling into question our traditional classifications. Hearing and seeing, in sensorial terms, put individuals in direct contact with the physical world and sometimes beyond its confines, whether connecting to a deity, a thing, or an experience. Votive objects could be seen as gifts in a Maussian sense, although gifts are not really gifts if a suite of obligations is extended forward in time. Looking back to Marcel Mauss, one might posit the workings of a form of sympathetic magic: by representing corporeal materiality individuals could evoke the phenomenology of hearing and listening to entice the deity to both hear and listen to the petitioner.
